Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Are IDiots Creationists?

I have complained about misuse of the term "Darwinism" by the Intelligent Design Creationists. They seem to be unable to grasp the fact that not all evolutionary biologists are Darwinists.

Having complained about that, it's only fair to consider their complaint that not all Intelligent Design advocates are Creationists. Casey Luskin raises the issue today on the Discovery Institute website [Another Way to Defeat the ID = Creationism MemeM].

Darwinian logic often contends that because a given proportion of ID proponents are creationists, ID must therefore be creationism. It's a twist on the genetic fallacy, one I like to call the Darwinist "Genesis Genetic Argument." As noted, it implies that each any and every argument made by a creationist must be equivalent to arguing for full-blooded creationism. This fallacious argument is easy to defeat on logical grounds by pointing out that some ID proponents are not creationists, and in fact have been persuaded to support ID in the absence of religion. Thus something other than creationism or religion must be fundamental to the set of views underlying ID (big hint: it's the scientific data indicating real design in nature)!

First off, it's ridiculous to pretend that some IDiots view the intelligent designer as anyone other than God. While I've no doubt that they might dig someone like this out of the woodwork, the fact remains that 99.999% of all intelligent design advocates see God as the designer. The term "creationist" refers to someone who postulates a role for a Creator (i.e., God) in creating life. Any IDiot who says they were persuaded to support intelligent design in the absence of belief in a Creator is, well, an idiot. But I repeat myself.

Second, there is no scientific data to indicate real design in nature. In fact, there's plenty of evidence to suggest a lack of "design" in much of nature (e.g., junk DNA). (Admittedly, many evolutionists are reluctant to accept this evidence.) The entire Intelligent Design Creationist movement is dedicated to disproving evolution. That's the extent of their "data." You don't become an Intelligent Design Creationist just because you've been brainwashed into rejecting evolution. You become an Intelligent Design Creationist because you've been brainwashed to believe in a Creator God and that, in turn, leads to the rejection of the other alternative, evolution.

There are many different kinds of creationist. They include Young Earth Creationists, Old Earth Creationists, and Theistic Evolutionists. The Theistic Evolutionists restrict the role of the Creator to setting up natural laws and then operating mostly within these natural laws to guide evolution. The Intelligent Design Creationists are a special group of creationists who argue against evolution and who claim (falsely) to have discovered evidence for supernatural creation (i.e., intelligent design). It is quite legitimate to refer to them as Intelligent Design Creationists because it distinguishes their form of creationism from the other forms of creationism.

Robert Pennock discusses this in his anthology Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics.

Dembski chides me for never using the term "intelligent design" without conjoining it to "creationism." He implies (though never explicitly asserts) that he and others in his movement are not creationists and that it is incorrect to discuss them in such terms, suggesting that doing so is merely a rhetorical ploy to "rally the troops." Am I (and the many others who see Dembski's movement in the same way) misrepresenting their position? The basic notion of creationism is the rejection of biological evolution in favor of special creation, where the latter is understood to be supernatural. Beyond this there is considerable variability. Some creationists think the world is young while a fewer number accept that it is ancient.

Pennock then goes on to show that Dembski is a creationist and so are most (all?) of his followers.

In spite of Luskin's whining (and Dembski's) it is quite appropriate to refer to Intelligent Design Creationism since the advocates of this superstitious nonsense are creationists by definition.

16 comments
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This fallacious argument is easy to defeat on logical grounds by pointing out that some ID proponents are not creationists, and in fact have been persuaded to support ID in the absence of religion.

Are there any actual examples of this? DaveScot's pretense of agnosticism has never been convincing. David Berlinski is on record as saying "I have never endorsed intelligent design."(1) [Stanley] Salthe said he did not find intelligent design to be a compelling theory, either. "From my point of view," he said, "it's a plague on both your houses."(2) So where are the examples of anyone supporting ID "in the absence of religion"?

Of course there are examples. Rael and his ufo sect, for instance, are passionate atheists but they believe in extraterrestrial intelligente design.Maybe they should consider collaborating with the discovery institute on some human clonations and such XDDD

So if the Intelligent Designer turns out to be Barry Bonds, does it matter that he is not God (well, he might be, except that he might be using chemical enhancement)? If one believes that life was created by Barry (or any other Designer), doesn't that make one a Creationist? Perhaps the problem is that maybe Bonds only drew up the blueprints, but did not know how to turn his idea into a working product.

Are there any actual examples of [ID proponents who are not religious-creationists]?

Astronomer and SF author Sir Frederick Hoyle, who happens to be an atheist. Together with equally oddball astronomer-mathematician Chandra Wickramasinghe, Hoyle developed a weird theory known as panspermia. Basically panspermia is Intelligent Design by a natural Designer instead of a supernatural one.

Your number 99.999% presumes there are at least 100,000 ID proponents, which I doubt... :) But I think the examples of Hoyle and Rael are irrelevant (even if they were true). They are not the ID proponents that we hear about all the time.

Astronomer and SF author Sir Frederick Hoyle, who happens to be an atheist.

Hoyle died in 2001, and is still dead.

Hoyle developed a weird theory known as panspermia. Basically panspermia is Intelligent Design by a natural Designer instead of a supernatural one.

Hoyle and Wickramasinghe's book Lifecloud promoted the idea of undirected panspermia - life on Earth came from space. This position is not equivalent to ID. It is possible that he promoted other forms of panspermia elsewhere.

Francis Crick wrote a book, Life Itself on the idea of directed panspermia. This was before the discovery of catalytic RNA, and before the RNA World theory took off. To quote Wikipedia, "After ribozymes were discovered, Crick became much less interested in panspermia because it was then much easier to imagine the pre-biotic origins of life as being made possible by some set of simple self-replicating polymers." Crick's dabbling in panspermia is generally not regarded as among his greatest accomplishments.

Fred Hoyle was quite imaginative, and operated frequently outside his area of expertise. He was involved in a claim that Archaeopteryx fossils were fraudulent, for example. Then there was his stupendously stupid "tornado in a junkyard" analogy.

Please go there, the guy who said that panspermia suggests a living designer: untrue.

Do you really think scientist would solve a problem that way? You got to be really ignorant of science to think that scientists would create some loop to avoid figuring out how life came to exist without suggesting God. Panspermia, if I'm not mistaken, hold that life did not come to exist on earth primarily but in space instead. Another commenter here elaborates this.

Although Fred Hoyle did come up with some nonsense, such as the probability of a single protein forming or something, he was an atheist. Correct me if I'm wrong here.

I thought I remembered Hoyle talking specifically about a designer, but perhaps not. However, I would suggest that panspermia does require an intelligent designer, whether or not he ever explicitly said so.

Hoyle argued that natural evolution was impossible, because an unintelligent process like evolution couldn't create new genetic data. He further said that life on any given planet advanced only when new genetic material arrived from space, in one way or another. It's not hard to see that this doesn't solve the problem of "where does the new genetic data come from?"; it only transplants it. You either get stuck in an infinite loop, or you have to postulate that somewhere in the dim mists of time, an intelligent agent somehow started the whole ball rolling.

He further said that life on any given planet advanced only when new genetic material arrived from space, in one way or another. It's not hard to see that this doesn't solve the problem of "where does the new genetic data come from?"; it only transplants it.

Yes, which points out the idiocy of the sort of panspermia proposed by Hoyle's collaborator Wickramasinghe during the SARS scare a few years ago. He suggested that SARS was a virus from space. That it just happened to have a sequence similar to existing Earth-bound viruses, and fall to Earth in a region where a similar virus infected wild animals, would require an awful lot of explanation.

anonymous wrote: "You got to be really ignorant of science to think that scientists would create some loop to avoid figuring out how life came to exist without suggesting God. Panspermia, if I'm not mistaken, hold that life did not come to exist on earth primarily but in space instead."

As noted by other commenters, this is merely a change of venue rather than a solution. However, Hoyle actually did propose a scientific solution, one that I haven't seen mentioned yet. Hoyle avoided the loop by positing that an entity or entities capable of design have always existed. This was possible only because Hoyle held the notion of a steady state universe, i.e., no Big Bang.

As more details of the cosmic microwave background radiation have emerged over the years, steady state theories have become progressively less likely, until at this point it is fair to call them scientifically untenable. Thus steady state theories should not be considered to provide scientific alternatives to the necessity for evolution.

I believe this article is redicu lous...first of all how is sandwalk going to call creationists idiots? We merely have a difference in opinion!The bible, prophets, and everyday miracles lead me to believe there is a Divine Wonder out there who created us. If there is no God, no creater, then we are merely an accident with not purpose or value. In that case it doesnt matter if we do wrong, it doesn't matter if we die because our existance happened by chance and we are only an unimportant, unnoticed life that evolved from a monkey.NO! i dont choose to call myself a monkey! I was created by the Divine Christ, Father of the World. He still intervienes in our everyday activity...God, infact is your creator.:]

If there is no God, no creater, then we are merely an accident with not purpose or value. In that case it doesnt matter if we do wrong, it doesn't matter if we die because our existance happened by chance and we are only an unimportant, unnoticed life that evolved from a monkey.

Greetings my children. I am the Lord Thy GOD. I have taken time from my busy schedule to set the record straight. First of all, the scientists are correct...I did not create you. You evolved. And though it is true that you did not evolve from a "monkey", you do share a common ancestor with that monkey. You crazy kids just need to face the fact that evolution is a Fact and that Intelligent Design is really just good-old-fashioned Baptist-style creationism with a new coat of paint on it. What's more is that I was actually created by MAN. That's right...I was conjured up out of pure Homo-Sapien imagination to explain scary things like death & thunder and to make people feel better when they got a raw deal in life by spinning promises of a magical candy-land called heaven where you would be rewarded after death. So, how did life begin? Search me...Like I said, you people created me. Frankly, I'm too busy to really worry about it. So why don't you ID proponents just relax and maybe take a science course or two and try to bone-up on your critical thinking skills. Anyhooz, I need to get back to work...I'm busy preparing HELL for stupid people who refuse to believe the evidence of their own senses and support stupid ideas like Intelligent Design. See you kids on Judgement Day!

Laurence A. Moran

Larry Moran is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. You can contact him by looking up his email address on the University of Toronto website.

Sandwalk

The Sandwalk is the path behind the home of Charles Darwin where he used to walk every day, thinking about science. You can see the path in the woods in the upper left-hand corner of this image.

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Some readers of this blog may be under the impression that my personal opinions represent the official position of Canada, the Province of Ontario, the City of Toronto, the University of Toronto, the Faculty of Medicine, or the Department of Biochemistry. All of these institutions, plus every single one of my colleagues, students, friends, and relatives, want you to know that I do not speak for them. You should also know that they don't speak for me.

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Quotations

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.Charles Darwin (c1880)Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory.

Charles Darwin (1859)Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation...

Quotations

The world is not inhabited exclusively by fools, and when a subject arouses intense interest, as this one has, something other than semantics is usually at stake.
Stephen Jay Gould (1982)
I have championed contingency, and will continue to do so, because its large realm and legitimate claims have been so poorly attended by evolutionary scientists who cannot discern the beat of this different drummer while their brains and ears remain tuned to only the sounds of general theory.
Stephen Jay Gould (2002) p.1339
The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1977)
Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers "just-so stories." When evolutionists try to explain form and behavior, they also tell just-so stories—and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.
Stephen Jay Gould (1980)
Since 'change of gene frequencies in populations' is the 'official' definition of evolution, randomness has transgressed Darwin's border and asserted itself as an agent of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1983) p.335
The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle"—operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat.
Stephen Jay Gould (1999) p.84

Quotations

My own view is that conclusions about the evolution of human behavior should be based on research at least as rigorous as that used in studying nonhuman animals. And if you read the animal behavior journals, you'll see that this requirement sets the bar pretty high, so that many assertions about evolutionary psychology sink without a trace.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is TrueI once made the remark that two things disappeared in 1990: one was communism, the other was biochemistry and that only one of them should be allowed to come back.

Sydney Brenner
TIBS Dec. 2000
It is naïve to think that if a species' environment changes the species must adapt or else become extinct.... Just as a changed environment need not set in motion selection for new adaptations, new adaptations may evolve in an unchanging environment if new mutations arise that are superior to any pre-existing variations

Douglas Futuyma
One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Francis Crick
There will be no difficulty in computers being adapted to biology. There will be luddites. But they will be buried.

Sydney Brenner
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist

Richard Dawkins
Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understand it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Jacques Monod
The false view of evolution as a process of global optimizing has been applied literally by engineers who, taken in by a mistaken metaphor, have attempted to find globally optimal solutions to design problems by writing programs that model evolution by natural selection.